


All Wired Up in a Dawning Ray

by echoinautumn (maybetwice)



Category: Girl Genius
Genre: Babies, Character Death, F/M, Grief/Mourning, M/M, Multi, Political Succession, Politics, Post-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-07-20
Updated: 2015-07-20
Packaged: 2018-04-10 06:09:10
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,683
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4380200
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/maybetwice/pseuds/echoinautumn
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The wars are over and life grinds forward, but Agatha and Tarvek keep paying their price for peace. Long live the Pax Europa.</p>
            </blockquote>





	All Wired Up in a Dawning Ray

**Author's Note:**

> Title from _Nos Da Cariad_ , by David Gray.
> 
> Sorry this is my introduction to the fandom, guys. .___.

*

The day the Pax Europa is sealed is the happiest the people have seen in years. It is done in ink and blood, in matrimony and oaths of fidelity; through the crown of the Storm King and with the Sparking vows of the heavily pregnant Lady Heterodyne, on the open air decks of Castle Wulfenbach and surrounded by the sun-bleached sky.

It is a hopeful day for the people, even those who still wear the black of mourning out of respect to the dead Baron Wulfenbach, God rest him in glory at the side of his lord father.

It is a beautiful day, even a good one.

Most of all, it is one that is finished.

Tarvek manages to convince Agatha that swearing oaths to one another in territory mistrustful of them both is for the best only because it is the simplest way to secure the loyalty of the Empire for her child, for _Gil’s heir_. He says nothing of what it costs them to be there on the decks of Castle Wulfenbach, what price they must pay to affirm their so-called happy ending in the shadows of where Gil once walked. He never needs to speak a word to Agatha to know just what it is she’s feeling, too.

It isn’t that Tarvek doesn’t appreciate the irony of getting exactly what he’d always wished for in the worst possible way, it’s only that it was never meant to be like this.

*

The terms of peace are simple enough: Lady Heterodyne shall assume the title of Imperial Regent until such a day as her first child achieves the age of majority. At that time, the heir of Houses Heterodyne and Wulfenbach shall inherit the titles and holdings of His Highness Gilgamesh, Baron Wulfenbach, God rest him in glory.

Prince Sturmvoraus shall ascend to the Throne of Lightning as the Storm King with Lady Heterodyne as his Queen and Consort, where they shall jointly and autonomously rule Sturmhalten, Mechanicsburg and all their holdings for all their days.

Any breach of this agreement shall result in dissolution of all terms of peace. Long live the Pax Europa.

*

The peace is fragile and untested and Agatha spends the first few months of their rule haunting the corridors of Castle Wulfenbach as she travels every remote corner of the Empire to put down rebellions. There is the matter of the royal family of Sturmhalten, the treacherous den of snakes that is Tarvek’s home, but Agatha is seeing to that. If Tarvek had left any such capacity for feeling toward them, he might pity their fate.

Tarvek has the more difficult job in negotiating reentry agreements, reaffirming trade pacts, and ruling from the ground with one eye always to the sky, waiting for Agatha to return to him. Against his greatest fears, fears that she will leave him like Gil left him and that he will be alone again, she always does.

Agatha’s laboratories collect dust behind sealed doors, and Tarvek abandons his books. The time for research has passed, and the time for action—grinding, achingly slow movement forward—has come.

It is bitter work, taking up the rule of the continent, but it is all that is left to them now.

*

“Do you ever find yourself wishing it had gone differently?”

Tarvek is curled protectively around her rounded belly and vulnerable like he never knew how to be before. Just a few years before, hardly any time at all, this is all he would have wanted and now it isn’t enough. They have each other, though, to hold the darkness at bay. It’s not quite rescuing each other, though; one could hardly say either of them could ever be saved.

Agatha hums—atonally, of course, because her maddened, Heterodyne humming has been silenced for months and the world that much dimmer around her—and tips her head back onto a pillow. Her fingertips scrape past Tarvek’s hairline, twirling the long auburn strands between them with slow, deliberate affection.

“I wish he were here,” she says honestly, dips her face until her lips skim chastely on his, and says what he is wishing: “I don’t wish it had been you.”

Tarvek squeezes his eyes shut, tries to think of any reason not to say what is he’s thinking, what has consumed him for months now.

“Do you ever think about changing it?”

Agatha’s fingers instinctively go to cover his hand on her belly. Tarvek knows that she has, and that neither of them ever will. Only it isn’t because either of them are afraid to die in Gil’s place. It isn’t that playing with time is dangerous for this world and the ones that surround it. It isn’t that they learned the danger from the elder Baron’s experiments on Mechanicsburg.

The idea that they could lose each other seems laughable, even now. Trite platitudes aside, their love seems unshakeable, constant, the one thing that could never be changed in any timeline. How else could they explain the lingering sense of Gil’s place in their relationship, the irreplaceable, phantom ache of a limb cut away?

Agatha would burn down the world if she thought it would reunite both of them with Gil. Tarvek knows himself, knows he would do even worse.

“Yes,” Agatha answers at last, and presses her mouth to Tarvek’s with fierce brutality.

It’s not that they’re afraid. It’s only that this threadbare final _hope_ of a thing that binds them to Gil is the one thing neither of them are willing to gamble away.

*

Barely three months past their wedding and coronation, Agatha births a girl that she and Tarvek name Valfreyja, who is born screaming and already fighting. The immediate devotion she has for such a small life alarms Agatha; the weighty importance Val carries for the rest of the realm frightens her.

Agatha promises to protect and adore her, to bring her up to be strong and passionate and good—the kind of sacred vows she heard about from other people a lifetime and only a few years past.

It is Tarvek who is the one to openly weep at the sight of her, to declare he will die for her, and it is he who is first to swear eternal fealty to a babe who burns with the intensity of her own joy and fury. Agatha finds that she must gently remind Tarvek through the intensity of his devotion that this can be only their beginning if the loss they endure is to be for any greater good at all.

It does not ever occur to either of them that it should be different for them now, that all their future loves and joys should not be bound up in their responsibility and grief. It does not seem to matter.

*

The first year flashes by in a blur, then the second; faster even than the years Agatha and Tarvek lost to time and the elder Baron. Agatha sees mistrust in the eyes of the Imperial Loyalists, who see the echo of Lucrezia in her own and do not trust a Storm King with their Wulfenbach heir, and wishes they would only _try_ to steal away this single remnant of a life that might have been.

It is growing, though, this piece of happiness, as Val nears her third birthday. 

When the time finally comes to disembark from Castle Wulfenbach, it is no joy to leave behind even the place Gil suffered his bitterest days. Val is as likely as not to set foot on the Castle again before her coming of age, when she will inherit her father’s titles and take command of the skies of Europa. The eyes of Europa watch her as she grows, waiting for her spark to manifest; praying that she inherits the best of all of her parents and not the darkness that haunts each of her forebears.

There is more still, the faintest solution that first forms in Tarvek, who has begun to think of himself as last Storm King and Val as the first true hope for long-term peace in Europa. 

But Val is still so young, it is unthinkable that he might be the one to lay the future of the world at her feet, and Tarvek cannot yet bring himself to think what he might do for love of this child who is as much his daughter as she is Gil’s.

And yet...

*

It is slow, relearning how to laugh, but that is what returns to Agatha first, and then to Tarvek. Their spark ignites again, as if it were only crowded out by pain and waiting to be welcomed back, and the dust is shaken from the libraries and laboratories in Castle Heterodyne. It isn’t long after that they begin to feel as if they are resuming their lives once again, although a version where grief has taken up permanent residence in the place Gil once inhabited.

It is a part of who they are now, one that Agatha is only now realizing will never entirely fade.  
It is as if it has always been this way.

It comes upon Tarvek one day when they’re building in Agatha’s laboratory, his notes scattered across a long table, Agatha suspended upside down and humming violently, while Val cheerfully carries tools across the lab to them, softly singing the names of each tool to the same tune until she knows them all. There is no rebellion on the fringes of the Empire to manage, no assassination plot lurking in the shadows, no crisis to keep them away from one another. It is charmingly idyllic, like so many of their days lately. 

So, it is a surprise that this is the moment that peace finally settles into Tarvek . He has just lifted Val up onto his knee and is dutifully explaining the internal workings of his delicately-constructed clank laid out on the table when he looks up and finds Agatha staring at them with distinct fondness, and Tarvek feels the fleeting touch of wistfulness.

 _Ah,_ he thinks, _this is what it would have been like._


End file.
